Green Fields (by W.S.Merwin)

作者：雪泥

时间：2006-4-10 周一, 下午4:40

GREEN FIELDS

By W.S.Merwin

By this part of the century few are left who believe

in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts

of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks

are sounds of shadows that possess no future

there is still game for the pleasure of killing

and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed

courses of their own other than ours and older

have been migrating before us some are already

far on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks

and point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence

Peter who had lived on from another time and country

and who had seen so many things set out and vanish

still believed in heaven and said he had never once

doubted it since his childhood on the farm in the days

of the horses he had not doubted it in the worst

times of the Great War and afterward and he had come

to what he took to be a kind of earthly

model of it as he wandered south in his sixties

by that time speaking the language well enough

for them to make him out he took the smallest roads

into a world he thought was a thing of the past

with wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighbors

working together scything the morning meadows

turning the hay before the noon meal bringing it in

by milking time husbandry and abundance

all the virtues he admired and their reward bounteous

in the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained

for the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to see

until the winter when he could no longer fork

the earth in his garden and then he gave away

his house land everything and committed himself

to a home to die in an old chateau where he lingered

for some time surrounded by those who had lost

the use of body or mind and as he lay there he told me

that the wall by his bed opened almost every day

and he saw what was really there and it was eternal life

as he recognized at once when he saw the gardens

he had made and the green fields where he had been

a child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close

and around him again were the last days of the world

_________________

About Merwin: Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Merwin's early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of the poems featured animals, which were treated as emblems in the manner of Blake. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it's a mystery', Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical'. Another powerful poem of this period is 'Odysseus', which reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic.In the 1960s Merwin began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form' (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) (which won a Pulitzer Prize) remain his most characteristic and influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra' or 'The Judgment of Paris') to explore highly personal themes.In Merwin's later volumes, such as The Compass Rower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988), one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii in recent years, and one sees the influence of this tropical landscape everywhere in the recent poems, though the landscape remains emblematic and personal.

来源：http://www.australianwinner.com/AuWinner/viewtopic.php?t=10852